TIME

ENLACE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO Gallery (Av. Pardo y Aliaga 676, San Isidro) announces the opening of the solo exhibition TIEMPO by the renowned artist JORGE VIGIL, next Wednesday, November 26.
Jorge Vigil (Lima, 1963) finished his studies in 1988 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes of Peru. A resident of Paris since 1990, he has engaged in intense artistic activity in France, the United States, Indonesia, and, of course, Lima, from where he initially departed with a grant from the French government to study at the Pau School of Communications. Among other distinctions, he won Second Prize at the Salón Lefranc Bougeois, Southwest Region in 1992; the Premio Cadena, Villa Montauban, in 1994; and in 2000, the prize at the First Villa de Nay Festival, all in France.
In this exhibition, visitors may observe ten works made using different techniques on canvas, and fifteen mixed techniques on paper, all recent output completed in France. In them, the artist’s approach is centered around the depiction of images that form part of a repertoire marked by nature, beauty, eroticism, the ambiguity of the human body, and the sanctity of unexplored spaces. Spaces that become a kind of obsession throughout his oeuvre, penetrated, for example, by sharp pencils. These “invaded” spaces open up to the viewer a kind of invitation into the unexplored. His constructions, almost chaotic, are nevertheless laid out in a geometric, orderly fashion, forming compositions that exhibit a great artistic mastery of drawing. The techniques used are of most diverse kinds: oil, watercolor, charcoal, intervened materials (canvases, old letters, pages from notebooks, maps, musical scores, etc.).
Of Jorge Vigil’s work, the art critic Élida Román wrote with regard to his previous exhibition in Lima: “…For those of us who have closely followed, even at a distance, the evolution of his art, this exhibition ratifies not only his fantastic skill at drawing, but also that peculiar imagination, fantastic, hallucinatory, and at the same time incisive, that imposes order on the jumbled, powerful world of his images.
If there is anything that may be pinpointed as the influence of or decisive inspiration for this display—or overflowing—of fantasy and realism united in a strange symphony that respects no harmonies and seeks no syncopation, it is the influence of the great Flemish masters, from Bosch to the Brueghels, among other followers. As in the case of Bosch, it may be said that the artist seeks in this parade of images, and even in those tiny details of adjectival elements, to show us an illustrated book in which everything has its place and its purpose, each one is a symbol, or a clue, or—when connected together—a minor metaphor that speaks of today’s world, disguised as an ancient formal reference. And like the Brueghels, there is also a moral to be found, although lacking in dogmatic, if not demonstrative, intent…”
The exhibition may be viewed through January 3, 2009, Monday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.